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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
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The one interview question I always ask
I’ve just gotten past a peak interviewing period where I would interview 3-5 engineering and product management candidates every week. I’ve used this question for as long as I’ve …
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A Programmer's Loss of Identity
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
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Technical Debt Is Like a Tetris Game
Expressive code in C++
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Traps to Developers
HTML and CSS
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The 100:10:1 method: my approach to open source
For many years I was whole hog into the open-source movement and at the time I rarely wrote a stitch of code in my free time that didn’t find itself in a public Sourceforge/GCode/Github repo. 1 However, over time I came to learn that the burden that came with publicly offering code to the universe, to put it mildly…
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Products Over Projects
Projects are a popular way of organizing software efforts, but long-running product teams are often superior
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Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions
For the past 7+ years, I've been conducting a programming interview that has been a true personal favorite of mine. It was passed down to me from good friends (Jeremy Kaplan and Carl Sverre, and it was the latter whom I believe invented it). This interview has probably been
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Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?
There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.
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Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
Not all developers make positive contributions. Some create more work for others than they do themselves.
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Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it
Yes, just set that deadline.
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Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind
How internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind
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Cost of Attrition
How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?
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When should you give up on a project that doesn't work?
I spent most of my free time after work over the last month working on a project and today I'm giving up.
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Build versus Buy
A few years ago I was working on a contract negotiation with Splunk, and we kept running into what felt like a pretty unreasonable pricing structure. They wanted some number of millions of dollars for a three year license, which felt like a high price to pay for roughly thirty-two ascii characters in a particular…
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A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people (2022)
When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.
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What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity
For 16+ years, we master the rules of school. Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins. Then we enter the workforce and none of it works quite like we thought. This becomes painfully obvious as you rise higher in the org. Even seasoned veterans forget
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How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)
Introduction Companies ask for a GitHub profile. Recruiters ask for a GitHub profile. The question “Do you contribute to open-source?” is now one of the most common questions asked in p…
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Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies.
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